Companies and organisations can be well described by the communications between staff and third-parties. Without communication, nothing happens. Business plans, growth strategies, deliveries, orders, invoices, appraisals and the like are mostly communicated by email or by telephone. Even important face-to-face discussions—which may not normally be recorded—are ultimately summarised, written down and communicated via email or telephone. In most companies, email and telephone calls are available only to the parties involved in the discussion and hence there is a large amount of information locked up in private email accounts and telephone recording systems. Although the digital nature of modern communications allows for storage and retrieval, there are practical (engineering), strategic and cultural obstacles to allowing these communications to be shared and searched.
Various solutions have been proposed in an attempt to allow communication sharing. For example, document management systems exist which purport to track and store email conversations according to the context of their content. However, such systems generally do so by simply tracking tokens embedded when the communication is initiated. These systems fail to see changes in content as the conversation evolves, or to include new messages from initially unrelated parties.
The integration of voice communications into a digital messaging system provides even greater challenges. Voice communications can account for a large percentage of information content but in their raw, digitised form, they cannot be searched for text strings. In order to do this, speech recognition algorithms must be applied to convert speech into text, while speech recognition accuracy is highly affected by speaker training and context.